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ARTICLE: Star Trek The Kobayashi Alternative Review
AUTHOR: Haggis and Tatties
DATE: June 19, 2003
RATING: 8 / 10

Ok, imagine the scene: A small dark room, lit by a dim green light which seems to flicker every now and again.  In front of this glow sits a hunched figure, oblivious to the world around, slowly wasting away from lack of food or drink (with a bladder which by now must be the size of a small banana republic).  Unwashed and disheveled this silent lump of immobile flesh has began something that he must either finish or die trying...  That was how I spent my youth: Sitting in front of my humble Amstrad 464 with green screen monitor playing one of the many text adventure games of the day...  Then I got a PC and any semblance of a life dissolved about me...  One such adventure game of the time was STAR TREK: THE KOBAYASHI ALTERNATIVE.  This was a text adventure released around 1985 by Simon and Schuster, based on the original TV show with Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Uhura, Checkov, Sulu and of course the Enterprise.

The Game starts off with a memo from Star Fleet sending you and the Enterprise to search for the USS Heinlein which has disappeared in the region of the 145 Trianguli star system, with a little reminder to adhere to the Prime Directive at all cost (yeah that's going to happen).

And away we go...

Now as text adventures went, The Kobayashi Alternative was just like any other text adventure of the time, but with a little added something: where other text adventure's had to follow a certain
structure and were quite linear in their game play, STTKA was completely unstructured. How can that be you ask?  Well for a game made back in 1985 it has some damn fine writing.... You could talk to anyone at any time and you could walk on every deck of the Starship Enterprise (on deck 21 I even found the fabled Enterprise bowling alley).  Now before you go running off to download it: No you can't find Uhura's or Rand's quarters and try and sneak in while they are in the shower.  Shame on you!  Anyway, I tried.

You could bark out order's to your crew telling them to do things, while you either perform some other task or just put your feet up and relax (after all you are the captain). While relaxing in that big comfy Captain's chair you could call McCoy and tell him to come to the bridge at once (he might even bring you some Romulan Ale, but knowing your luck it will be a date for your next physical). Then if you change your mind you could call him again and tell him to go and do something else (yeah, that will teach him), or you can annoy Mr. Scott in Engineering...  I must have spent something in the region of 2 hours exploring this Text Enterprise: sickbay, engineering, the
Transporter room...etc. You can use transporter at any time, beaming anything or anybody left, right, up, and down. You can fly to any planet were you will find a world to explore. Some worlds aren't very interesting, but we can't have everything.

Room to room movement is made by a press of the arrow key's in the direction you want to go (which I find a better solution than having to type go north, go south and so on...) plus the usual commands of examine, look, take, push, and kill a tribble are all there.  Ok maybe not the tribble one...  The Interface is very clean looking and easy to read. The in game window has a description of what is happening which takes up the top half of the screen.  In the middle is your input bit were you type in you commands, and at the bottom is the status of the Enterprise and some of her systems like shields, engines, weapons, and so on.  There is also a clock which ticks away in the bottom right... Yes that's right, you have a time limit. The whole game is open to you from the very beginning: you are in command and you make the decisions on what to do next... In its own way this is the game's major problem: it is so unstructured that you really do need help to play the game and find out what to do next, because you can spend so much time wandering about the Enterprise that you forget what your looking for (thank goodness for the internet).

Now as with all these older games DOS played a big part, and now that 99% of us use some form of Windows, getting these games to run can be a bit of a nightmare... It did run but I had a problem with the game clock reaching the hour in just 15 seconds and the game would then end.  I really did have a headache getting it to run... The game has some bugs but considering it was made in 1985, I think it holds up pretty well. I have not yet finished playing through the game but I blame that on my own lack of brain power as I seem to have become dependant on using the mouse to play adventure games now (I blame Monkey Island). The thing about these old text adventure games is that they really did capture your imagination, just the same way as picking up a book.  It would allow your mind to build the worlds within its pages; you could lose hours and hours in a really good book and the same could be said for text adventure games.

So, overall I give TKA a texttastic 8/10...  If you get it going...

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